Monday, September 28, 2015

[Updated from Sunday, 9/27, 1:40 p.m.] Rarely has a state government set out to wreak havoc on itself to feed needy political egos, reward insiders and advance crackpot ideology (see Kansas, Brownback, et al), but that's where Wisconsin is headed.

So before it's too late, Wisconsin lawmakers should be forced in the name of fairness and logic to bury permanently a GOP-inspired plan that appeared out of nowhere last week to discard the protections for taxpayers which support and define the state government civil service personnel system.

Like similar and recent right-wing GOP efforts to kill the state Open Records law and the non-partisan Government Accountability Board, the civil service eradication proposal is a partisan power-grab, pure and simple and overwhelmingly self-interested and cynical.

Citing and hyping the slimmest of evidence - - a handful of headline-grabbing outrages by a few bad apples among tens of thousands of dedicated public servants and their multiple millions of hours of honest work - - game-playing GOP legislative leaders and an ever-opportunistic Gov. Walker again went to their deep well of anti-labor sentiment when announcing they intended to scrap civil service exams and turn state employee recruiting, hiring, promotion and termination over to agency heads whom Walker has already appointed.

Which will lead to personnel decisions - - from the mail room to the board room - - inevitably and intentionally influenced by friendships, party affiliations, political preferences and campaign donations.

How much control is enough for this Governor and his party?

Grossly-secretive and tilted redistricting has already allowed GOP legislators to reward Walker with far greater powers than his predecessors wielded over state assets, including jobs.

Can you imagine a state hiring system where Big Pharma and insurers are better able to get their favored resumes more easily into the hiring process at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Do the road-builders and trucking firms need more influence at the WisDOT - - which purportedly regulates them?

Whose interest is being served if pipeline and fossil fuel businesses and builders gain even more access to staffing at the DNR and the Public Service Commission?

Should partisan organizations, lobbyists, and advocacy groups be better positioned to pitch their people to every state agency, with gubernatorial appointees able to make the hiring, promotion and firing decisions in coordination with the Governor or his office staff?

Wisconsin is at an ethical crossroads.

Inefficiency, waste, personal preferences for public personnel, partisan advantage and corruption - - the basics of political danger and heartbreak - - are dead ahead.

Excellent post, but you forgot the next act.This is going to set every state agency up for crisis and failure. The experienced, knowledgeable professionals who stayed on despite Act 10 will be chased out... to be replaced by donor offspring and mid- to low-level GOP campaign staffers. (The campaign managers, lawyers, and spokespeople have already claimed most of the unclassified positions.)

Every state agency will face crippling under-staffing and/or systemic incompetence.What comes next? One by one, state agencies will be privatized.

I am in state service and it's extremely clear on the inside that the goal is privatization, first corrections, and total control for whats left. This is really "The fire at a whim, hire my buds" act. But it cannot be anything but a method of destroying state service. What wasn't down the toilet is going now.

This is what the majority of Wisconsin voters want. If people don't like what is happening then they should have convinced more people to vote differently. Democrats have only themselves to blame for turning away Wisconsin voters. Perhaps at the end we will vote to change the state name to Wiskochsin.

Anon 12:34 - You're right about the subset of the electorate that listen religiously to Charlie Sykes, but not the majority of WI voters. WI voters want decent paying jobs, economic growth, general personal safety, opportunity for their kids, the lights to turn on, generally saving money (including but not limited to taxes), etc. What Walker/WIGOP does is come up with policies to serve their own interests and then shoehorn it into a narrative that points towards those ends. This messaging/spinning is where Dems are coming up short.

Thing is, NOBODY ran on most of this stuff.

Find me a Wisconsinite who's saying:"Gee, I'd really like to start a small business (or buy a new car, etc) this year, but with my neighbor Bob having civil service laws at his job at the DOT, I don't know if I can swing it. I've got this great business plan, but you know what I really need to get it off the ground? A $250 million cut to the UW. Teachers and prison guards being able to bargain for their working conditions is kind of a big hurdle too. And it would be really great if we could restrict early voting, disband the Govt Accountability Board, and gut Open Records laws. Yeah, that'd give me the confidence I need to take the plunge!"

lufthase, If the majority did not want this, then why were these people elected.In state elections the majority wins. We are getting exactly what we deserve for being so weak and uninformed. New name Wiscossippi ?

Anon- I think you're missing my point that most of these egregiously bad policies are "governing by surprise." Gutting civil service laws, open records, GAB, etc weren't ever on the table as election issues, so Walker/GOP can't claim a mandate from the voters for this stuff.

You and I probably agree that WI Dems have done (and continue to do) a terrible job on messaging and connecting with voters; and, further, that the WI electorate is under/mis-informed.

However, the attitude that we should blame the voters or that Wisconsinites are getting what they "deserve" doesn't do anybody any good. We're in a bad spot, it's gonna take a long time clean up Walker's messes, and we should be identifying where to focus our efforts -- and part of that is placing blame, not on the WI electorate we hope to win-over, but on Dem Party Leadership, Dem Candidates, the MJS editorial board, generally lazy/false-equivalence-pushing/sensationalist media, RW radio, voter suppression, voter apathy (gets back to Dems' messaging/motivating), gerrymandering, astro-turf groups like Americans for Prosperity, billionaires wielding outsized influence, campaign finance laws not being enforced, etc.

Furthermore, your question about what "the majority" wants can just as easily be turned around. If there's a clear "majority" in WI that wants all this extremist, Tea Party, power-grab stuff, then how heck did Tammy Baldwin get elected to US Senate? Baldwin actually got 210,000 more votes than Walker ever has. The deck is certainly stacked against us for mid-term state govt offices, but Baldwin's and Obama's success disproves the Walker's-clear-mandate, WI-wants-this stuff.

Anon and Lufthase, I see both of your points. But would you consider my own point, the one I've repeated several times on several blogs: By the recall (second) election, anyone who was surprised by anything that happened hadn't been paying attention. By the third election those who voted for Walker et al deserved what they were very surprised to find out was happening to them along with those other Wisconsinites they assumed deserved it. That's why I think it's so important to point out 2014 election results when something hits the fan in a red community. It's not being nasty, it's part of that 'paying attention' thing that was so important then and even more so right now.

Anon - I'm not a party insider by any means, but from my limited interactions with them, I think Julie Lassa, Kathleen Vinehout, Peter Barca, Chris Taylor, and Janet Bewley are all sincere, thoughtful people trying to do what's best for WI and are worth supporting. I don't always agree with them 100% of the time, but I think they're genuinely trying to do the right things for the right reasons. Such is life in a 2 party system.

Sue - I totally agree that we should be pointing out WIGOP failures, especially when they hit home in "Red" areas. (Ideally, this should be coming from Dem candidates in those areas, but failing that we bloggers/commenters must keep up the drumbeat.)

Just maybe use different language. Telling anybody they "deserve" what they're getting isn't gonna translate into votes very well. It just reinforces the us-vs-them, politics-as-a-team-sport mentality that's been tearing our state apart (and making it that much easier for Walker to create scapegoats to divide and conquer). Talking about voters getting what they "deserve" also sounds a bit like we're giving up.

We all know folks who truly take some perverse delight in seeing harm done to their preferred scapegoats. They may be loud and may even donate the most money, but I don't think they make up the majority of Walker voters; and we're not going to convince them of anything anyways.

The folks we need to reach are the ones without giant yard signs whose news intake consists of 20 minutes of 620-AM on their way home from work, and maybe the largely useless if-it-bleeds-it-leads Fox 6 News at 10. Their sparse information-intake is generally because they're busy with tons of other stuff (and often disgusted by politics of all stripes); it's not a character flaw. They've been fed "GOP = Good for Business" and "Dems = High Taxes, Taking Away Your Guns, and Handouts to Undeserving Welfare Queens." They're exposed to these themes/narratives/spin, but not to actual results or policy analysis.

I think you're hitting on the most important things we can do to reach these folks -- point to concrete results in their local area. Talk about how GOP policies cost jobs, increase local taxes, decrease vital local services they take for granted, hurt the quality of education, poison our drinking water, limit access to healthcare (raising costs for everybody), and generally make WI a crummier place to live (driving away young, talented people)… and put a human face on the scapegoat du jour.

1) We need to recall Walker, Fitzgerald, Vos, Darling, Vukmir et al. and make them stand trial for conspiring to destroy Wisconsin for their own personal gain. There's a reason why Walker stacked the Supreme Court and then had the John Doe records destroyed.

2) After these people are removed from office, we need to quickly introduce an "Act 9" that would undo every bit of the criminal legislation introduced by the above-named.

That would be the same strategy that failed in the past, made democrats look crazy and allowed SW to honestly claim 2 more victories. Protesting just makes people feel good about themselves while they buy overpriced organic food, cute named coffee and overpriced cars which no poor person could actually buy. But of course they still claim that they really care. The only answer is to come up with candidates who can convince more people to actually vote for them.

Along with assembly and Senate seats drawn in a fair and honest manner - this would require no log rolling. I do believe Dems had more statewide votes for both houses than the current, so called, "majority."

How do you explain the Republicans winning when Democrats drew the lines for their own benefit. Move forward. What is the PLAN for 2016 and 2018. Do something to attract votes or get steam rolled again and look like cry babies

Anon 12:50 - For the record, Democrats never had a chance draw WI district lines for their benefit. After the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses, the legislature deadlocked and the district lines were drawn by the courts each time. The post-2010 GOP redistricting was the first time one party got to unilaterally draw the lines in a long, long time.

I agree with Jake, with the caveat that in addition to pointing out failure/damage caused by GOP polices and corruption we need to be proposing clear alternatives. For example, Barca and Lassa are on the right track with proposing a new proper (and transparent!) state agency to take over WEDC awards. As much as we scream bloody murder about the obvious corruption and incompetence at WEDC, without an alternative model it would be very easy for GOP to cherry-pick a few "success stories" and say "if you're against WEDC, you're against workers at XYZ company or against all businesses/economic growth/etc."

I think we continue to struggle with this on K12-- since we oppose vouchers, we're easy targets for being labeled complacent and supporting whatever "failing" public school GOP deigns to point at. The real answer is mostly centered around improving and stabilizing students' lives outside the classroom, but that's very nuanced and tough to measure. I don't know how we get that message to resonate broadly, but figuring that out needs to be a high priority.

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What water, wetland protection is all about

"A little fill here and there may seem to be nothing to become excited about. But one fill, though comparatively inconsequential, may lead to another, and another, and before long a great body may be eaten away until it may no longer exist. Our navigable waters are a precious natural heritage, once gone, they disappear forever," wrote the Wisconsin Supreme Court in its 1960 opinion resolving Hixon v. PSC and buttressing The Public Trust Doctrine, Article IX of the Wisconsin State Constitution.

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James Rowen's Bio

James Rowen, a writer and consultant, has worked for newspapers, and as the senior Mayoral staffer, in Madison and Milwaukee, WI. This blog began on 2/2/ 2007. Posts run also at various news sites, including The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's "Purple Wisconsin."